I got bored and gave this as an answer to a question today, but I figured it might have broader uses. (Not to me, of course, since I don't deal with data like this, but maybe for some of you.) It will figure out column headings and extract fixed-width ASCII fields based on them. It assumes each heading is a single word (uses the spaces between headings to determine field length), but can be adapted with a regex in the code comments to work around that.
use Data::Dumper;

my (@keys, $format, @data, @sizes);

$_ = <DATA>;

# assumes spaces between fields.. a more robust regex,
# allowing multiple words in fields but requiring at
# least 2 spaces between fields could be:
#      /\G(\S+(?:\s\S+)*)\s+/g
while (/\G(\S+)\s+/g) {
    push(@keys, $1);
    push(@sizes, $+[0]-$-[0]);
}

$format = join("", map { "A$_" } @sizes);

while (<DATA>) {

    # if you want a hashref for each line:
    my $i;
    push(@data, { map { ($keys[$i++], $_) } unpack($format, $_) } );

    # else, take out references to @keys above and just use this:
    # push(@data, [ unpack($format, $_) ] );
}

print Dumper(\@data);

__DATA__
Name            ID      PS      Gender     Age      Month    Code     
+ Cap        Pool
LName, FName    99999   99      M          99.9     12/2000  Add      
+ 99.99      99.99

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In reply to Parse fixed-length ascii table by Fastolfe

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